Mollie and George Addington had no parents. Their mother had
died when they were tiny children and their father when Mollie
was sixteen. He had been in business in Manchester; a cotton
business of some sort, and they were brought up in a suburb of
Manchester, in a big ugly red house a few miles out of the town.
Mollie once showed me some photographs of their house, and it
seemed to me odd that George and Mollie should come from a place
like that. It was not like them at all. They were rather rich
and had a motor-car long before every one did. Their father was
interested in politics, and a Liberal. He used to read articles
from the _Manchester Guardian_ aloud to them in the evenings, and
later on when they were older they used to read them to him.
It was chiefly Mollie that did the reading; imports and exports
and rates of exchange. I asked Mollie once if she had hated all
that reading aloud, and she looked surprised.
‘No—not particularly,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to me to
hate it, and I was sorry for Father.’
Mollie went to a High School in Manchester. She went in by train
with her father in the mornings, and came back alone after tea.
George used to go to a day school too at first, and then he got
his Winchester scholarship and went away. Mr. Addington was quite
well off, but he had said from the beginning that George should
not go to a public school if he did not get a scholarship.
‘And so I got it,’ said George with his broad smile. ‘I don’t
suppose I should have, except for that. Father was like that;
he was grim, and he made people do things.’
Mollie looked after them both. I think she would have looked
after them anyhow, but her father put her definitely in charge
of the house when she was fourteen. She was given the keys of
the store-cupboard and the domestic cash-box, and three months
later the housekeeper was dismissed. ‘I will give you three months’
apprenticeship,’ her father had said. ‘You will do the housekeeping
with Miss Hopkins at first, then under her supervision, and at
the end of three months you should be competent to undertake
it without help.’
He gave her eight pounds a week, and she had to account for every
penny she spent. On the first of each month there was an ‘audit
day’ when she brought her account-book into the study and handed
over to her father all the receipted bills. Everything had to
be paid in cash, and she might not leave one penny unaccounted
for. At first there were many discrepancies. She forget to enter
tram-fares; sometimes she gave pennies to beggars and forgot
to put them down. Her father was patient with her, she said.
He would go over the whole account, checking each item to see
if the missing pennies could be traced. Sometimes they could
not, and he would write ‘3_d_. unaccounted for’ across the foot
of the page. He did not punish her when this happened, but she
felt it a disgrace, and sometimes she would cry about it in bed.
This did not happen often after the first year, and Mollie was
a wonderfully capable person when I knew her.
Afterwards, when I tried to do accounts and couldn’t, I used
to wonder if I should have learnt better if I had been trained
to do it by Mollie’s father, but I don’t suppose it would have
made much difference really.
Mr. Addington was a Unitarian and a teetotaller. George and Mollie
used to go to a big chapel with Morris windows, and they were
put into a ‘Band of Hope’ when they were eight years old, and
signed ‘pledge cards’ to say they would never drink alcoholic
drinks. When she was fifteen Mollie had to teach in the Band
of Hope. She had to give lessons on the effects of Alcohol on
the Human Body, and her father gave her books to read about it
in. All this seemed very odd to us when we first got to know
the Addingtons. It was so different a world from ours, and yet
the Addingtons were like us in fundamental things.
Mollie showed me her ‘pledge card’ once. It had a picture of
St. George fighting the Dragon, by Walter Crane, on it, and some
rather fine texts round the sides. It seemed to me a queer, barbarous
idea, like ‘unclean meat,’ or some old primitive taboo.
Mollie laughed when I said so.
She said:
‘I suppose it is. I should never make my own children sign anything
like that, but I somehow didn’t like to give it up. I feel a
sort of loyalty to Father. I don’t think it matters, but he did;
if he was alive I think I should tell him I didn’t agree any
more and give him back the card. But as he is dead I can’t. Perhaps
that’s rather silly, but after all, there’s no strong reason
the other way.’
George was not a teetotaller when we knew him. He had felt like
Mollie for a time, he said, after their father’s death, and then
he definitely broke through the feeling of taboo, as something
irrational to which one should not give in.
‘_Magnus pater sed maior veritas_,’ he said, and Hugo laughed at
him, and said he was a Puritan in his negation of Puritanism.
Neither George nor Mollie had remained Unitarians. Mollie’s scientific
mind had overcome her loyalty here; also, as she herself told
me, Mr. Addington’s religion had been far less vital to him than
his political and social creed.
They were both Liberals, and this seemed to me the oddest of
all. To Hugo too it seemed odd, but not so much to Guy. I believe
that with a different environment Guy might have been a politician.
It had always been a joke against Guy that he liked to read the
newspaper; not just reviews or headlines, but the solid political
articles. But even he had no particular party, and it was the
party that seemed so curious to Hugo and to me. To suppose that
one could agree, always, on all points, with one group of people,
and that one must support one party.
‘How can you agree always with one group of people?’ Hugo asked
George one day, in a punt.
‘I don’t always agree on every point,’ said George, ‘but mainly,
on the most important questions.’
‘But you might agree with one party on one important point, and
another on another. What would you do then?’
‘That doesn’t often happen, as a matter of fact. But if it does,
I suppose one would go with the party one agreed with on most
points. You must work together with some group if you want to
get things done.’
‘Yes, getting things done. That’s the whole difficulty. I doubt,
you see, whether this getting anything done is worth the intellectual
dishonesty involved in it.’
George laughed.
‘But if you see something very wrong going on, a child working
in a mine, or something like that, you want to do something about
it. You want to stop it.’
‘No,’ said Hugo after a pause. ‘I am afraid I don’t. I only want
to run away and not look.’
George laughed again.
‘I don’t believe that,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that is “intellectual
dishonesty” on your part, Hugo. You don’t like to own to an ordinary
good impulse.’
Then we all laughed, Hugo too. But he added presently:
‘It would not be a good impulse even if I did try to stop a child
working in a mine; it would only be another sort of selfishness,
removing something that was disagreeable to see.’
And George rejoined:
‘But I never said the Liberal Party was unselfish. I never suggested
the motive that made them want to remove abuses. I only said
they did want to!’
And so it would go on. I used to be interested listening to their
arguments. I agreed most with Hugo, but what George said made
things stand out quite differently from the way I had thought
of them before. Chiefly, though, what interested me, was the
fact that George and Mollie should be Liberals themselves. I
had taken it for granted that political parties were silly; George
and Mollie were not at all silly. That was more convincing to
me than arguments on either side.
George was a few months younger that Hugo, Mollie a few months
older than Guy. George and Hugo were in their first year at Oxford,
Mollie and Guy in their third.
They were all together a great deal during the next two years,
and the Addingtons came to stay at Yearsly in the vacations.
Once Guy and Hugo went to stay with them in Manchester, and once
I did, but that house never seemed to belong to them as their
rooms in London did.
When Mollie had finished at college they left the Manchester
home and moved to London, to the flat in Chelsea which seemed
afterwards so much a part of them and of our life in the next
few years.
There had been a suggestion at one time that I should go to college.
If my mother had been at home I expect I should have gone; but
Cousin Delia had a slight inclination against the idea, and my
grandmother also, and as I was undecided myself the balance turned
against.
If I could have been there with Mollie it would have been different,
but she would have left almost as I arrived, and after she had
left I saw much more of her in London; and Hugo I should hardly
have seen in term time. To be there with him, and rules keeping
us apart, I should have hated; and I had had enough of being
in a herd of other girls.
So after Christmas I was sent abroad, to a French family first,
and then a German.
I stayed five months with each and came back for the summer in
between.
It was dull with those families. I had thought it would be exciting
to go abroad, but it wasn’t. They were kind people, but they
never left me alone. I was taken about to museums and galleries
and looked after all the time. It was almost less free than school.
When I came back, Mollie had left Oxford. She took only three
years there, and went on with her biology in London.
I lived in term time with my grandmother again, and went to classes
and lectures at Bedford College. I learned Italian and went on
with my music, and Mollie came very often to Campden Hill, and
I went to her in Chelsea; sometimes I would meet her at the laboratory
where she worked, and we had lunch in an A.B.C.
Often, too, we went to Oxford and saw Guy and Hugo and George.
We stayed in lodgings in St. John’s Street, generally from Friday
till Monday, and we would go long walks, all together, over Shotover
sometimes and a long way on towards Otmoor, or sometimes along
the Upper River past Godstow and Bablockhythe. There was a ferry
there that we used to cross. It was in autumn or winter, that
walk. I remember it chiefly with a red frosty sun. And in the
summer we would go up the Cherwell in canoes; right up beyond
the branching of the rivers, to a place where the willows met
overhead and their shadows met together in the water.